Drone Attacks: Killing Civilians at the Rate of Fifty to One

Posted on April 13, 2009 by RagBlog


60 drone hits kill 14 al-Qaeda men, 687 civilians
By Amir Mir / April 10, 2009

LAHORE — Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.

Figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities show that a total of 701 people, including 14 al-Qaeda leaders, have been killed since January 2006 in 60 American predator attacks targeting the tribal areas of Pakistan. Two strikes carried out in 2006 had killed 98 civilians while three attacks conducted in 2007 had slain 66 Pakistanis, yet none of the wanted al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders could be hit by the Americans right on target. However, of the 50 drone attacks carried out between January 29, 2008 and April 8, 2009, 10 hit their targets and killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda operatives. Most of these attacks were carried out on the basis of intelligence believed to have been provided by the Pakistani and Afghan tribesmen who had been spying for the US-led allied forces stationed in Afghanistan.

The remaining 50 drone attacks went wrong due to faulty intelligence information, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children. The number of the Pakistani civilians killed in those 50 attacks stood at 537, in which 385 people lost their lives in 2008 and 152 people were slain in the first 99 days of 2009 (between January 1 and April 8).

Of the 50 drone attacks, targeting the Pakistani tribal areas since January 2008, 36 were carried out in 2008 and 14 were conducted in the first 99 days of 2009. Of the 14 attacks targeting Pakistan in 2009, three were carried out in January, killing 30 people, two in February killing 55 people, five in March killing 36 people and four were conducted in the first nine days of April, killing 31 people.

Of the 14 strikes carried out in the first 99 days of April 2009, only one proved successful, killing two most wanted senior al-Qaeda leaders – Osama al Kini and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan. Both had lost their lives in a New Year’s Day drone strike carried out in the South Waziristan region on January 1, 2009.

Kini was believed to be the chief operational commander of al-Qaeda in Pakistan and had replaced Abu Faraj Al Libi after his arrest from Bannu in 2004. Both men were behind the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dares Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, which killed 224 civilians and wounded more than 5,000 others.

There were 36 recorded cross-border US predator strikes inside Pakistan during 2008, of which 29 took place after August 31, 2008, killing 385 people. However, only nine of the 36 strikes hit their actual targets, killing 12 wanted al-Qaeda leaders. The first successful predator strike had killed Abu Laith al Libi, a senior military commander of al-Qaeda who was targeted in North Waziristan on January 29, 2008. The second successful attack in Bajaur had killed Abu Sulayman Jazairi, al-Qaeda’s external operations chief, on March 14, 2008. The third attack in South Waziristan on July 28, 2008, had killed Abu Khabab al Masri, al-Qaeda’s weapons of mass destruction chief. The fourth successful attack in South Waziristan on August 13, 2008, had killed al-Qaeda leader Abdur Rehman.

The fifth predator strike carried out in North Waziristan near Miranshah on Sept 8, 2008 had killed three al-Qaeda leaders, Abu Haris, Abu Hamza, and Zain Ul Abu Qasim. The sixth successful predator hit in the South Waziristan region on October 2008 had killed Khalid Habib, a key leader of al-Qaeda’s paramilitary Shadow Army.

The seventh such attack conducted in North Waziristan on October 31, 2008 had killed Abu Jihad al Masri, a top leader of the Egyptian Islamic group. The eighth successful predator strike had killed al-Qaeda leader Abdullah Azzam al Saudi in east of North Waziristan on November 19, 2008.

The ninth and the last successful drone attack of 2008, carried out in the Ali Khel region just outside Miramshah in North Waziristan on November 22, 2008, had killed al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubair al Masri and his Pakistani fugitive accomplice Rashid Rauf.

According to the figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities, a total of 537 people have been killed in 50 incidents of cross-border US predator strikes since January 1, 2008 to April 8, 2009, averaging 34 killings per month and 11 killings per attack. The average per month killings in predator strikes during 12 months of 2008 stood at 32 while the average per attack killings in the 36 drone strikes for the same year stood at 11.

Similarly, 152 people have been killed in 14 incidents of cross-border predator attacks in the tribal areas in the first 99 days of 2009, averaging 38 killings per month and 11 killings per attack.

Since September 3, 2008, it appears that the Americans have upped their attacks in Pakistani tribal areas in a bid to disrupt the al-Qaeda and the Taliban network, which they allege is being used to launch cross border ambushes against the Nato forces in Afghanistan.

The American forces stationed in Afghanistan carried out nine aerial strikes between September 3 and September 25, 2008, killing 57 people and injuring 38 others. The attacks were launched on September 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 15, 17, 22 and September 27. However, the September 3, 2008 American action was unique in the sense that two CH-47 Chinook transport helicopters landed in the village of Zawlolai in the South Waziristan Agency with ground troops from the US Special Operation Forces, fired at three houses and killed 17, including five women and four sleeping children.

Besides the two helicopters carrying the US Special Forces Commandos, two jet fighters and two gun-ship helicopters provided the air cover for the half-an-hour American operation, more than a kilometre inside the Pakistani border.

The last predator strike on [April 8, 2009] was carried out hardly a few hours after the Pakistani authorities had rejected an American proposal for joint operations in the tribal areas against terrorism and militancy, as differences of opinion between the two countries over various aspects of the war on terror came out into the open for the first time.

The proposal came from two top US visiting officials, presidential envoy for the South Asia Richard Holbrooke and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen. However, the Pakistani military and political leadership reportedly rejected the proposal and adopted a tough posture against a barrage of increasing US predator strikes and criticism emanating from Washington, targeting the Pakistan Army and the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and creating doubts about their sincerity in the war on terror and the fight against al-Qaeda and Taliban.

Source / International / The News

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Dennis Kucinich: Get Out of Afghanistan, Too

Posted on April 13, 2009 by RagBlog

Obama has proposed an $82 trillion dollar WAR SUPPLEMENT to the budget. I do not believe in war, whether in Afghanistan or along the Mexican border, where a huge chunk of this money is also destined.

I am hearing that “some people on the Left” believe that a US invasion of Afghanistan is justified because it will liberate Afghani women. Oh yah, I am sure a military invasion is just what they need to improve their status; doesn’t war ALWAYS help women the most???

“Hey, hey, President Obama,
Invading Afghanistan is nothing but trauma!”

It’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini) that, after all these years doing “anti-war,” has made me a genuine pacifist. Not speaking out STRONGLY against this course of action NOW is a mistake. There are viable alternatives that don’t involve the US rushing in to yet another place it has no business being.

Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog / April 13, 2009

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The Meaningful Way to Combat Terrorism

Posted on April 13, 2009 by RagBlog

Greg Mortenson, shown with students from the Sitara School he established in northeast Afghanistan in 2005, says education is the best ammunition against misogynistic terrorist regimes like the Taliban. Photo: Greg Mortenson.

Build relationships, author tells cadets
By Alexa James

Recommends ‘3 cups of tea’

WEST POINT — Author and activist Greg Mortenson introduced himself to an auditorium of Army cadets, then told them how to win in Afghanistan:

“Drink more tea.”

Mortenson met with students in West Point’s Counterinsurgency Operations class on Tuesday to discuss his humanitarian work in Central Asia and his best-selling book, “Three Cups of Tea.”

The Army veteran explained: “First cup you’re a stranger, the second cup a guest. On the third cup you become family.”

“That doesn’t mean you just go around drinking tea and having peace and freedom in the world,” he said. “What it means is, you have to build relationships.”

Mortenson, 50, has spent the last 16 years establishing schools in volatile regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He’s been kidnapped by feuding tribes, questioned by the CIA and lambasted by foreigners and Americans alike. But through his nonprofit Central Asia Institute, he established nearly 80 schools for some 28,000 boys and girls.

Education, he says, is the best ammunition against misogynistic terrorist regimes like the Taliban. “We can drop bombs or hand out condoms or build roads,” he said, “but if we don’t educate the girls, nothing is going to change.”

Mortenson is not alone in this thinking. He works closely with U.S. commanders on counter-insurgency strategies that consider local customs. On a large screen in the auditorium Tuesday, he talked the cadets through slides approved by the Pentagon specifically for the West Point lecture. The diagrams outlined the complex overlay of tribal and ethnic allegiances in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the ways the Taliban extorts the system to build new allegiances.

Combating that societal shift, Mortenson said, will force American leaders to adjust their policies, too. “Sometimes things seem very unconventional, they seem very risky, like talking with the Taliban. Often, those are where the solutions are.”

Mortenson criticized Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for ignoring Pakistan and Afghanistan on her recent visit to Asia. He also disparaged the previous administration for refusing to talk with enemies.

And in turn, some of the cadets challenged Mortenson’s approach, pushing him to account for well-educated terrorists, such as those who hijacked the airplanes on September 11.

Intense debates over social and military doctrines are the bread-and-butter of this counterinsurgency course. Maj. James Spies, a Special Forces soldier-turned-professor, encourages his students to question everything and expect change. “What applies this week in Iraq,” he said, “definitely doesn’t apply this week in Afghanistan.”

And it won’t apply to sophomore Tim Clark, 22, when he graduates from West Point. Relying on expertise from those inside and outside the Army’s circles is “vitally important,” he said. “I think Mr. Mortenson is dead on in saying that you need to build relationships.”

Source / Times Herald Record / Originally posted on March 13, 2009

Thanks to Rebecca Jehn / The Rag Blog

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Somali Pirates: Other Than What We Are Told?

Posted on April 13, 2009 by RagBlog


Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates
By Johann Hari

Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.

If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century”.

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy.” This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live.” In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.” William Scott would understand.

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.” Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?

Source / The Independent, U.K. / Originally posted Jan. 5, 2009

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / The Rag Blog

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Wall Street and the Pentagon : Greed and its Delusions

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Greed and its requisite delusions. Art by Tom Payne / Eyeball Press.

At the heart of both scams is the deliberate corruption of information on such a vast scale that it overwhelms the mind of the educated layman to make sense out of it.

By Chuck Spinney / The Rag Blog / April 12, 2009

MARMARIS, Turkey — Bill Moyers conducted a fantastic interview with Professor Bill Black, a specialist in securities fraud, on April 3 (Listen to the podcast here and read Moyers’ analysis of this interview in Counterpunch.) I found the interview fascinating, because the scam in the banking industry is so similar to the scam in the Pentagon, only the scale of the fraud perpetrated by the bankers made the milcrats in the Pentagon look like pikers.

At the heart of both scams is the deliberate corruption of information on such a vast scale that it overwhelms the mind of the educated layman to make sense out of it. This of course is no accident. Overloading other people’s minds results in enormous leverage to the faction doing the overloading — whether that faction is made up of the power hungry Apparatchiks in Versailles on the Potomac or the greedy Oligarchs in Versailles on Hudson.

Moreover, the very process of constructing the Potemkin village of misinformation creates a world view that captures the imagination and thinking of its builders. Note how Black hints that some of the scam artists become true believers. Alan Greenspan’s pathetic revelation that his “model” was wrong proves the power of this effect.

Greenspan’s self delusion is very familiar to old line reformers in the Pentagon. We called it incestuous amplification — or the process by which a decision maker’s orientation, or his interior model of how the world operates, distorts his observations of external events to such a extent that he sees and act on what he wants to see, rather than the external world as it is.

When this happens, the whole decision cycle insensibly becomes disconnected from the external environment it purports to cope with, and the inevitable result is confusion, chaos, and in the presence of menace, it can even devolve into panic, which is now clearly evident in the irrational gyrations of the stock market. Add in the insidious effects of criminal greed (among the relatively few rotten apples) and of self interest (which affects everyone), and incestuous amplification becomes a recipe for a catastrophe on a humongous scale — whether it takes the form of a failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a meltdown of the Pentagon’s modernization program, a Wall Street meltdown, or even a national meltdown.

The really scary thing about this kind of behavior is the self-organizing character of the evolving catastrophe, or what I call the anatomy of decline. It evolves more from the bottom up via a process of trial and error than from a top-down conspiratorial design. The morally bankrupt oligarchs on Wall Street did not design their corrupt financial structure from the git go; they evolved it over time through little corruptions or adaptations in an interplay of chance and necessity — lobbying here, creating an instrument there, cleaning out a regulator, constructing new bonus formulae, and so on.

Consequently undoing the intricate web of relations, like those now shaping the collective behavior in the Pentagon or on Wall Street, is the real challenge of reform. Boyd’s work on the OODA loop is really insightful with regard to understanding and attacking this problem (but I must acknowledge that in the end, the reformers led by Boyd failed to reform the Pentagon).

By the way, Bill Black’s interview also highlights the central flaw in the theory (really the ideology) of free market capitalism — namely the necessary assumption that information about the market is freely available to all decision makers. This assumption also implies people have no memories, but conveniently for the theorists, the assumption makes the mechanistic “model” of economic equilibrium possible. Of course, in the real world, information is not free. If information were free, there would be no “experts.” Fraud would be impossible. Indeed, the very existence of the information industry proves that information is not free.

Moreover, if information were free, the information industry would not be a two-edged sword, where the increasing power to manipulate vast amounts of “information” with computers (and increase the complexity of information to mind-numbing levels) also makes fraud, self-delusion, and disequilibrium easier, not harder. I found this systematic corruption of information to be central to the chaos and corruption in the Pentagon, and although I do not know him, I think Bill Black would agree that it is also the case on Wall Street.

Thanks to Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog

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Religious Right Concedes Defeat!

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

‘Armageddon for the Religious Right.’ Art by Matthew Bors / Orlando Weekly.

America’s religious Right has conceded that the election of US President Barack Obama has sealed its defeat in the cultural war with permissiveness and secularism.

By Alex Spillius / April 10, 2009

WASHINGTON — Leading evangelicals have admitted that their association with George W. Bush has not only hurt the cause of social conservatives but contributed to the failure of the key objectives of their 30-year struggle.

James Dobson, 72, who resigned recently as head of Focus on the Family — one of the largest Christian groups in the country — and once denounced the Harry Potter books as witchcraft, acknowledged the dramatic reverse for the religious Right in a farewell speech to staff.

“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said.

“We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

Despite changing the political agenda for a generation, and helping push the Republicans to the Right, evangelicals have won only minor victories in limiting the availability of abortion. Meanwhile the number of states permitting civil partnerships between homosexuals is rising, and the campaign to restore prayer to schools after 40 years — a decision that helped create the Moral Majority — has got nowhere.

Though the struggle will go on, the confession of Mr Dobson, who started his ministry from scratch in 1977, came amid growing concern that church attendance in the United States is heading the way of Britain, where no more than ten per cent worship every week.

Unease is rising that a nation founded — in the view of evangelicals — purely as a Christian country will soon, like northern Europe, become “post-Christian”.

Recent surveys have suggested that the American religious landscape has shifted significantly. A study by Trinity College in Connecticut found that 11 per cent fewer Americans identify themselves as Christian than 20 years ago. Those stating no religious affiliation or declaring themselves agnostic has risen from 8.2 per cent in 1990 to 15 per cent in 2008.

Despite a common distaste among evangelicals for the new Democratic president, who is regarded as at best a die-hard, pro-abortion liberal and at worst a Marxist, a serious rift is emerging among social conservatives in the wake of his election victory.

A growing legion of disenchanted grassroots believers does not blame liberal opponents for the decline in faith or the failures of the religious Right. Rather, they hold responsible Republicans — particularly Mr Bush — and groups like Focus on the Family that have worked with the party, for courting Christian voters only to betray promises of pursuing the conservative agenda once in office.

“Conservatives became so obsessed with the political process we have forgotten the gospel,” said Steve Deace, an evangelical radio talk show host in Iowa who broadcast a recording of Mr Dobson’s address, which he said had appeared on Focus on the Family’s website before disappearing.

Mr Deace added: “All that time spent trying to sit at the top table is not time well spent. Republicans say one thing and do another.”

In the southern Bible belt, many like the Rev Joe Morecraft, head of a small Presbyterian church near Atlanta, judge that the Christian movement failed not because its views were unpalatable for moderates and liberals, but because “it was not Christian enough”.

A deserter from the Republican Party, he said Christians had been corrupted by politics and needed to return to the basics of local social work and preaching the gospel, rather than devoting their “energies to getting a few people elected”.

He is not alone in questioning how evangelical leaders such as Mr Dobson could spend a career campaigning against abortion and then eventually support a candidate like Senator John McCain, who has dubious “pro-life” credentials.

Ray Moore, president of Exodus Mandate, a South Carolina-based group which organises home-schooling for Christian children, said: “Political involvement by Christians is not wrong, but that’s all the big groups did for 25 years. They were more concerned with fund-raising and political power than they were with our children’s welfare.”

“It’s a failed movement,” he said. “We will end up like England, where the church has utterly lost its way.”

Michael Spencer, a writer who lives in a Christian community in Kentucky, said the religious Right had suffered from its identification with Mr Bush, the most unpopular president in living memory, and the extremist rhetoric of some on the religious Right.

One of the more notorious outbursts was the Rev John Hagee’s assertion that the deadly Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was God’s judgment on New Orleans for hosting a gay parade.

In an online article in the Christian Science Monitor that has became a touchstone for disaffected conservatives, Mr Spencer forecast a major collapse in evangelical Christianity within ten years.

“Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake,” he wrote.

Source / Telegraph, U.K.

Thanks to S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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Republicans’ New Line : Obama a Dangerous Polarizer

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Republicans dig up Newt Gingrich playbook: Turning back the clock.

Now that Obama has been in office over seventy days, the second phase of the strategy has been unveiled as Republicans across the board suggest that he is a divider and polarizer.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / April 12, 2009

Gingrich tactics now deployed against Obama

Shocked by the results of the 2008 election, Republicans went back to the Newt Gingrich playbook for tactics to put them back in power. Newt again became a major Republican guru, as the party recommitted itself to obstructionism. Despite the crises the nation faced, it dedicated itself to trying to block Obama’s recovery efforts. Rush Limbaugh offended some GOP friends by giving away the central GOP game when he frankly said he hoped the new president failed. The tactic was to work to prevent success while briefly saying nice things about President Barack Obama.

Now that Obama has been in office over seventy days, the second phase of the strategy has been unveiled as Republicans across the board suggest that he is a divider and polarizer. Paint him as a dangerous radical. There is no need to offer details.

This is very similar to the treatment Bill Clinton received. Though he was a thorough-going centrist, Republicans launched a concerted efforts to delegitimize him. Both Clinton and Obama were denied honeymoons because their views were radical.

In Clinton’s case, Republicans spawned the “Arkansas Project “to dig up dirt on Whitewater, which led to a new investigation. A sickly partisan judicial panel removing a fair investigator in order to facilitate a fiercely partisan probe. We might also recall that early in the Clinton years, it was revealed that many Republican columnists actually coordinate their columns and talking points. Today, it is obvious that this remains their modus opperendi.

This time Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh rant on about socialism, communism and nationalization. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota laments that there may be no rich people in America as a result of Obama’s policies. Glenn Beck is even frothing about goose-stepping Nazis, black helicopters, and detention centers, forgetting that potentially dangerous FEMA policies and the alleged detention centers were results of the policies of Ollie North, Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

At the other end of the GOP information spectrum so-called moderates make the same case without all the wild language. Republican columnist Michael Gerson writes that Barack Obama is the “most polarizing new president.” David Brooks, another writer who has credentials as a reasonable Republican, seems close to this position. Neither, has been able to make a case for such a claim, but Gerson performs some rather astonishing mental gymnastics to support his contention. Ever so briefly, Gerson, Brooks and Katherine Parker seemed a bit off the Republican reservation as they suggested that Sarah Palin might not be the best candidate in 2012 and argued that the party should be something other than the Party of No and Obstructionism. Now they are safely back on the reservation and reading off of the official script.

The vagueness of the GOP charges examined

Several weeks ago, E.J. Dionne questioned these vague charges against Obama and the claim that he was a radical. My guess is that what bothered the GOP most was that the stimulus plan contained many provisions to strengthen the safety net for the poor. As recently as three months ago, there were fewer people on welfare than a quarter of a century ago. That is a measure of how much damage the welfare reform of 1996 had done to the poor, marginalized and helpless. Obama was temporarily reversing this supreme Republican accomplishment, and they were infuriated.

It is also likely that they are bothered that there is a danger of enacting a universal health care plan that would take care of all Americans. Bill and Hillary Clinton ran into a buzz saw of criticism when they attempted to enact a plan that threatened the interests of the insurance companies.

Most Republicans, other than a handful of governors in very red states who have turned back money for the poor and unemployed, cannot come out and say they are against helping the poor lest some undeserving folks benefit. Now days, they even have to mask their opposition to a health plan that might not sufficiently enrich the insurance companies. Vagueness explained!

Gerson’s case

David Gerson was vague about what made Obama so radical, but he said Obama was divisive because the President was not getting Republican support in Congress. As evidence, Gerson notes that not one Republican voted for the Obama budget. Well, not one Republican voted for Clinton’s first budget. Does this mean that Republicans are hyper-partisan or that both Obama and Clinton are wild radicals. Does Gerson remember Clinton’s success in battling deficits?

There was briefly an effort on the part of conservative Democrats to add to the budget a Republican plan to strip the government of $93 billion in revenue over a decade by raising the limit for inheritance tax. Now that concession stands as a separate proposal and is supported by ten conservative Democratic Senators. This is probably the sort of thing Gerson would see as evidence of moderation and bipartisanship.

Then Gerson serves up the claim that Obama’s budgets would greatly increase debt over a decade, without noting that most of the debt in the five out years was a result of entitlements in place long before Obama took office. He cuts Obama no slack on interest payment incurred before he took office or as part of a stimulus package.

Gerson sketches a strange picture of our recent past. The fact is that Democrats provided Nixon and Reagan with votes to pass some of their initiatives in part because they had been elected to the White House and should have been given some co-operation. Democrats also helped the Bushes pass legislation. True, they rejected some extremist nominees to the courts. Democrats have a history of functioning as a party of government. By contrast, Republicans have been delaying the confirmation of executive branch nominees and have already listed endless conditions for the approval of judicial nominees.

We heard that there were no Republican ideas incorporated in the stimulus package at the same time that Senator Kit Bond ran around Missouri bragging about how he rolled the Democrats by adding all sorts of local goodies and then refusing to vote for the package. It is a simple fact that Obama, up front, included too much in tax relief in a failed effort to attract Republican votes for the stimulus. He obviously misread their motives and mindset.

Gerson does not comment on the stimulus, but he laments that Republicans were “flattened, not consulted” in the budget process. He offers no proof of this sweeping generalization. Does he remember the multiple times when Democratic committee members were actually locked out of committee meetings when Republicans ran the House? Sometimes Republican chairmen refused to let Democrats attend, instead permitting lobbyists to join in the marking up process. Sometimes Democrats were kept off conference committees. Gerson has also forgotten that Obama’s proposed down payment for health care was stripped out of the budget, as was the reserve for another TARP.

Republicans blame Obama for letting Congress write both the stimulus and the budget. This argument, fleshed out by other Republican propagandists, is that the President should have written both to see that Republican thought was reflected in them. We had the examples of Carter and Clinton who had serious problems with their own party in Congress because they overlooked the prerogatives of Democrats on the hill. Gerson would place Obama in this no win situation, without explaining it to his readers.

Gerson implies that Republicans would have been more generous with their votes had he made even more concessions. The fact is that Republicans have come to march in lock-step, as though they belonged to a European style parliamentary party rather than to an American political party. In Clinton’s case, they only provided votes when they got exactly what they wanted, a massive assault on the welfare system, telecommunications “reform” that turned over the airwaves to giant corporate interests and opening the door to endless cable rate hikes, and, of course, the deregulatory reforms that have now wiped out most of our retirement savings and some pension plans.

Now we read that Eric Cantor, number two Republican leader in the House and a self-proclaimed expert in Gingrich tactics, sent out a memo to all Republicans instructing them to harass freshmen Democrats whenever they try to speak. In the first instance this tactic was deployed, a new Democrat trying to talk about health care reform was badgered about alleged Democratic responsibility for AIG bonuses.

Health Care

Another sign of radicalism is that Congressional Democrats is talking about the possibility of enacting “controversial elements of the budget” using the budget reconciliation rule. This would mean 51 votes in the Senate rather than the “normal 60.” More bad history! Bob Dole began the process of threatening a filibuster against any piece of legislation the GOP disliked. No rule would be violated if the budget reconciliation process were used. Gerson forgets that the Republicans frequently used this process to lower taxes for the rich and for other partisan purposes.

This leads us to what must be bothering Gerson — health care. The Democrats cannot pass universal health care without invoking the budget reconciliation rule. Even with the rule, they will have to have some sweeteners for the Democrats who are owned by the health insurance industry. He may say that the cap and trade energy program will come under the rule as well, but it is unlikely that Democrats from troubled industrial states will stand still for this.

Gerson ignores Obama’s many concessions to the Right

While accusing Obama of being a “source of division,” Gerson overlooks all the positions Obama has taken to appease the Right. The fact is that Obama is a uniter, and most Americans perceive this. What Gerson and other Republican propagandists are doing is attempting to transform one of Obama’s greatest strength into a weakness.

President Obama’s health care program concedes too much to the insurance companies, even though these concessions add unnecessary cost. In Iraq, he lengthened the timetable for withdrawal. He has continued renditions, stood behind Bush’s uses of the state secret privilege, not asked for a rewrite of the Patriot Act, and appears to have continued the sweeping and questionable wiretapping program begun by a rightist regime. Despite loud Republican laments about socialism and nationalizing banks, Obama has not nationalized the banks and has adopted a bail-out plan that looks too much like the Paulson Plan. Even though the UAW supported Obama in the campaign, Obama has been tougher on Detroit than Bush was. There are even indications that Obama will not go nearly as far as the Europeans and many progressives ask in regulating financial markets. Obama has done nothing to encourage or help Congressional probes of abuses of power under Bush. Yet, we hear that he is an extremist and a very polarizing figure???

This effort to delegitimize is about a young black man in the White House

One reason Republicans are so vague in their charges is that they need to suggest that this young, African American president is a radical — an angry black man — with some sort of dangerous, unspecified agenda. Hence, a substitute for right-wing broadcaster Laura Ingram said that Michelle Obama was a “tramp.” Senator Richard Shelby tells Alabama constituents that Obama probably was not born in the United States. Taking a page from Joe McCarthy’s playbook, Spencer Bachus of Alabama tells voters that he has the names of 17 Congressmen who were socialists. He seemed to be answering Michele Bachmann’s demand for an investigation of anti-Americanism among Congressmen. They did not mention Obama, but there is no mystery about what their findings would be. Rush Limbaugh, who does what passes for thinking on behalf of over 20,000,000 voters, blended Obama’s name with that of a ruthless African dictator, in the most recent of his many racist comments.

It all plays to racial animosities. At this writing, Obama’s approval rating in the South stands at 41%. Last Sunday, CNN reporter John King interviewed three whites in Tennessee about Obama’s foreign trip. These good folks were relieved that he did not embarrass himself or his country.

Obama has said nothing about further gun control, but ammo and gun sales started going up the day after he was elected. Even after the terrible killings in Binghamton and Pittsburgh, Obama is not talking about what the Second Amendment might mean. The crazed shooter of three policemen in Pittsburgh was certain Obama would take his guns and was also convinced that Jews run the world. Vague, unspecific charges inflame people like this and many others who are not demented but are prisoners of what we hope will be a bygone culture.

At the far right of the Republican spectrum, Obama is not viewed as a legitimate leader due to his race and also because his policies are considered “liberal.” For more than two decades, movement Republicans have bathed in a sea of ugly, toxic propaganda to which they have slowly become prisoners. For more than two decades, Republicans have been in battle mode, overdosing on rhetoric that feeds rage and irrational fears.

This is not to suggest that all Republicans, or their more moderate pundits, share any racism with some southern folks or the NRA survivalists. But at some level their thought processes have been disrupted and steered into the conviction that progressive Democrats could not be good Americans or be really entitled to govern this great land. The war on terror rhetoric deepened these views and persuaded most Americans that they had to acquiesce in the surrender of basic rights in exchange for physical safety.

It’s not surprising that the governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons, recently insulted the President of the United States and his office. Noting that the president would visit Nevada in May, Gibbons sent a proper note inviting Obama to visit him. But the invitation was released with a ridiculing and complaining press release that could only have been intended as an insult and un-invitation, this strange thought Obama did not merit the respect due other occupants of the Oval Office. Gibbons went off party script when he complained that the stimulus plan sent too little to Nevada. Cut him a break, he was busy sending hundreds of text messages to a female friend not his wife.

In Arizona, one of the reddest of states, a large university invited Obama to speak at commencement, but refused to grant him an honorary doctorate because he lacked sufficient experience and accomplishments. We certainly hope that none of the esteemed administrators at Arizona State University harbored racist thoughts. More than likely they saw Obama as somehow an illegitimate occupant of the White House.

The University of Notre Dame has invited Barack Obama to address its graduates and will award him an honorary degree. A vocal minority, supported by the local bishop and Cardinal George of Chicago, are critical of the university because Obama’s position on abortion and some related issues is not that of the Catholic Church. The people who raise these objections have something in common with the rural, red state folks who cannot accept Obama as a legitimate president. They believe that America will never again be dominated by rural, evangelical whites, and they are very angry about it. By the same token, a vocal but perhaps majority element in the Catholic hierarchy realizes the church will never have the power and influence it once had. It cannot recruit enough priests and people are leaving it in droves. Those who remain are furious about the clergy sex scandal, and most are disinclined to listen to the bishops. In both these instances, Republicans have figured out how to harness for political purposes deep frustrations and resentments.

Talking down the recovery

The Republicans have refused to give the new president a honeymoon and have adopted tactics that even threaten the recovery. They have repeatedly insisted that the stimulus will not work, and a PNC Corp. study shows that 47 % of businessmen buy this argument. How many of that 47% will go out and invest in new jobs if they believe that? The Ipsos/McClatchy tracking poll found that about 47% of the general population did not give Obama good marks on the economy. Helped by dishonest Republican charges, many even blame Obama for the AIG bonuses. They forget that it was the Republicans who first objected to restraints on executive compensation.

Now there have been some very small “glimmers of hope” that suggest there could be some improvement by late September. Without skipping a beat, Eric Cantor switched from blaming Democrats for the recession to saying there was not much of a recession in the first place. The new line is that the Democrats overreacted. RNC national chairman Michael Steele chimed in his agreement, adding that all the people in the shopping malls proves there is not much of a problem.

Mastery of the message

One would think that voters would see some duplicity in the works of Eric Cantor, the acknowledged party ideologue in the House. However, over time, people have been conditioned to simply accept such inconsistencies from rightists who claim to be more American and patriotic than the rest of us. In the last two decades, the Republicans have
learned how to apply the findings of modern cognitive science, while Democrats often seem inept in even common sense techniques to self-defense.

This calls to mind a successful tactic used by the Republican who recently ran for Congress in the 20th district of New York. The results were so close that no one has been declared a winner. He repeatedly said his opponent voted to give the AIG executives big bonuses, and this tactic clearly did not injure the Republican. The fact was that his opponent was not an incumbent and had never served in any office. The tactic worked because the press will not call Republicans on any of their shameful tactics. It also worked because Republican consultants have mastered communications theory and have repeatedly proven that it is not difficult to rewire the memory of the electorate. Irresponsible charges on the stump, along with the refusal of the mainstream media to point out the worst offenses, have transformed the public square, into a place where fear, hate, and bald lies trump reason.

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Mad at Michele : Pesticide Companies Miffed at White House For Organic Garden

Posted on April 11, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

After President Obama was elected, and even before the magnitude of the recession became apparent, there was a push from community food activists to plant a “Victory Garden” on the South Lawn of the White House. Led by Roger Doiron, founder of the Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine non-profit to encourage home gardening, a petition drive was started through the “Eat the View” campaign that gathered over 100,000 signatures using Facebook and other social networks to encourage the Obama’s to plant a garden. [On March 20, 2009,] Michele Obama, along with 23 fifth graders from the Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, DC, broke ground on an 1100 square foot plot. This will be the first garden on the lawn since Eleanor Roosevelt had a garden at the White House during the second world war. — Sustainable Agriculture. Photo from USA Today.

Chemical Companies Want Obama to Use Pesticides
By Alan Locklear / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2009

The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) has a bone to pick with Michelle Obama. MACA represents chemical companies that produce pesticides, and they are angry that — wait for it — Michelle Obama isn’t using chemicals in her organic garden at the White House.

I am not making this up.

In an email they forwarded to their supporters, a MACA spokesman wrote, “While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made [us] shudder.” MACA went on to publish a letter it had sent to the First Lady asking her to consider using chemicals — or what they call “crop protection products” — in her garden.

Michelle Obama has done America a great service by publicizing the importance of nutritious food for kids (she’s growing the garden in partnership with a local elementary school class) as well as locally grown produce as an important, environmentally sustainable food source.

I just signed a petition telling MACA’s board members to stop using Michelle Obama’s garden to spread propaganda about produce needing to be sprayed with chemicals. I hope you will, too.

Please have a look and take action.

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Leon Panetta’s CIA : Getting Away With Torture

Posted on April 11, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

CIA Director Leon Panetta at his ceremonial swearing-in on Feb. 19, 2009. Photo by Jonathan Ernst / Reuters.

Hope Abandoned:
Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

By Chris Floyd / April 11, 2009

It was obvious from the moment that Barack Obama appointed Leon Panetta to head the CIA that there was going to be no serious investigation — much less prosecution — of the high crimes of torture committed by the agency at the order of the Bush White House. Panetta, a Clinton retread (who actually began his career in the Nixon administration), has always been a bland, feckless, obedient servant of the Establishment; he has no outside power base, no pull, no heft, no popularity — nothing that would enable him to grab hold of the CIA with both hands and clean that fetid, blood-encrusted house. And of course, it was precisely this kind of powerless figure that Barack Obama wanted in the post.

The appointment was very typical of the Obama operation. Panetta had made a few very mild statements over the years that would allow him to be passed off as some kind of “progressive” in the witless, substanceless “process stories” that the corporate media do for new government appointees. This would be enough to keep the progressive “base” — which was overwhelmingly inclined to give Obama every benefit of every doubt — lulled long enough to get the patsy into the job.

Of course, to actually get the job, Panetta had to make it clear to Congress that he wasn’t going to stir up any trouble on the torture front, and was willing to play along with anything the Unitary Executive might order him to do. But the corp-media made little of this, concentrating instead on Panetta’s rote assertions that “America doesn’t torture,” and his embrace of the Army Field Manual as the standard for CIA interrogation. (Of course, the vaunted manual also allows practices that any rational human being would consider torture, but that’s another story.)

Once Panetta was confirmed in his figurehead director’s role, the Obama White House then confirmed its true intentions regarding the rogue agency. It has put the actual running of the CIA into the hands of one of the top figures involved in the Bush torture program. Scott Horton at Harper’s points us to the remarkable story by investigator John Sifton, detailing Obama’s retention — and promotion — of Bush’s willing torturers. From Sifton, at The Daily Beast:

“On Monday night the confidential report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program was published on the website of the New York Review of Books. The report confirms previous allegations about CIA abuses against detainees. Unlike earlier reporting, however, the document is based on irrefutable first hand information: interviews with detainees and U.S. officials. The document describes in stark detail the CIA’s use of forced standing, sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, assaults, and waterboarding. It also discloses the participation of CIA medical personnel in torture….

“The New York Times reported that Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, has taken the position that “no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.” Yet a number of CIA officials implicated in the torture program not only remain at the highest levels of the agency, but are also advising Panetta. Panetta’s attempt to suppress the issue is making Bush’s policy into the Obama administration’s dirty laundry.

“Take Stephen Kappes. At the time of the worst torture sessions outlined in the ICRC report, Kappes served as a senior official in the Directorate of Operations—the operational part of the CIA that oversees paramilitary operations as well as the high-value detention program. (The directorate of operations is now known as the National Clandestine Service.) Panetta has kept Kappes as deputy director of the CIA—the number two official in the agency. One of Kappes’ deputies from 2002-2004, Michael Sulick, is now director of the National Clandestine Service—the de facto number three in the agency. Panetta’s refusal to investigate may be intended to protect his deputies. Since the basic facts about their involvement in the CIA interrogation program are now known, Panetta’s actions are increasingly looking like a cover-up.”

Sifton also makes a very important point about the Red Cross report on torture that has been almost entirely ignored (which is not surprising, given that the Red Cross report itself has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media that gives us the “news” of the day):

“Another overlooked fact is this: the ICRC report is an important legal document that contains well-sustained allegations of criminal conduct with legal significance. Unlike earlier claims in books, magazines, and newspapers, the ICRC’s allegations are official notices from a legally recognized entity. The ICRC, after all, is not Human Rights Watch, the Washington Post, or The New Yorker, all of which have reported on the CIA’s secret prison program. The ICRC is an official entity recognized under the Geneva Conventions and various other earlier international treaties relating to armed conflict and prisoners of war. The ICRC is specifically tasked under the Geneva Conventions to visit prisoners and communicate with detaining powers to uphold the conventions’ spirit and purpose. Its interpretations and statements on matters of international law are held as legally authoritative. As such, the ICRC’s allegations have legal significance beyond previous disclosures. In effect, the document itself is evidence in a criminal case.

“Note in particular the report’s date, February 14, 2007—Valentine’s Day. On that date, the U.S. government was put on notice about the allegations of CIA torture. (The ICRC also wrote to the U.S. governments about the issue of disappearances at several points in 2003-2006.)

“Under international law—the Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and basic precepts of customary international law—the United States has a positive obligation to investigate and prosecute persons alleged to have committed torture and other violations of the laws of war. As of Valentine’s Day 2007, and possibly earlier, the U.S. government was obligated to investigate and prosecute the abuses detailed in the report. The United States’ failure to do so is a recurring breach of international law.”

The United States has formally adopted the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture; they are not some kind of “foreign devilment” messing with our sacred sovereignty: they are the law of the land. But it is clear that the Obama Administration does not have and never had the slightest intention of obeying the law and instigating the required investigations and prosecutions of the high crime — the capital crime — of ordering and committing torture. And the reason for this refusal is also clear: the Obama Administration wants to retain the power to torture, to conduct “paramilitary operations” with secret armies and single assassins, to carry out mass, illegal surveillance of the population with no legal accountability, to do “whatever it takes” to keep the machine of war and domination churning at full strength. That is why they have retained apparatchiks like Kappes and Sulick; that is why they are not only defending the Bush gang’s egregious assertions of authoritarian power, but are actually seeking to expand them, as Glenn Greenwald and others have detailed.

It is understandable that people hunger desperately for change after the open, scalding evils of the Bush years. It is understandable that they would seize on an attractively packaged figure who made a few progressive noises, carried a great deal of genuinely symbolic weight due to his race, and was more personable, cool and articulate than his god-awful predecessor. It is understandable that many people would want to give this figure the benefit of the doubt, to turn a blind eye to the many warning signs that emerged during the campaign, and hope for the best. After all, who would not rather live in hope?

But hope must be grounded in reality; and it must be invested in the right place. When reality gives it the lie, then it must be abandoned. There is no hope to be found in the Obama Administration: no hope for genuine change, no hope for a clean break (or any kind of break) from the relentless and ruthless promotion of empire, oligarchy and militarism. By his own choices — his appointments, his policies, his court actions, his rhetoric — Barack Obama has demonstrated beyond all doubt his sincere and abiding commitment to “continuity” in the most pernicious and corrosive elements of America’s lawless hyper-state. To place one’s hope in such a figure is a crippling, disastrous folly.

The only hope that can be associated with the Obama Administration is the long-shot, rapidly fading, outside chance that they could be forced — very much against their will — into at least slowing the militarist-oligarchic juggernaut by strong, sustained, massive, informed political opposition from the public. (And no, not the “tea-bag” fantasies of the fascistic Right, whose only real complaint about Obama — aside from the unspoken one about his skin color — is that he is not militarist and oligarchic enough.)

I don’t believe this will happen, that this kind of genuine and fruitful dissent will arise on a scale large enough to pressure the administration into making changes in order to save its own political skin. Nor do I, as some do, place any “hopes” — if that’s the word — that some outside power (or combination of powers) or calamitous event (or combination of calamitous events) will force the juggernaut onto another course. As in the case of the present global financial collapse, the reaction of the elite to such circumstances will be to do more of the same, to try more and more desperately to return to the status quo — or, as today, to exploit the panic and chaos of disaster to extend their own power and privilege even further. And with a militarist elite that possesses an arsenal capable of bringing the world down with them if they can’t hold on to power, I can’t contemplate such a Götterdämmerung of suffering and death with anything like “hope.”

But I also know that I don’t know what the future might bring. So whatever small hope I still have resides in the flickering possibility of engendering the kind of large-scale, genuine, fruitful dissent described above. I realize that this is a rather slim reed to hang on to; yet it is a mighty oak when compared to a hope invested in leaders who protect and promote torturers, who perpetuate — and laud — mass war crimes, who expand tyrannical powers, and who sell their children’s birthrights to a keep a tiny, rapacious elite in ascendancy. I will take my slim reed over such brutal delusions any day.

[Chris Floyd is an American writer and frequent contributor to Counterpunch where this article also appears. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at chris-floyd.com.]

Source / counterpunch

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin on The Peep Diaries

Posted on April 11, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


To Peep or Not to Peep? That is the Question

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2009

[The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, by Hal Niedzviecki, City Lights.]

In 1953, the British historian, Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay entitled “The Hedgehog and the Fox” that made him famous the world over. Berlin argued that there were two fundamentally different kinds of thinkers. There were the hedgehogs of the world, and there were the foxes. The hedgehogs had, he explained, one dominant idea that informed everything they wrote about. The foxes knew a great many things, and were not satisfied to be identified with a single all-embracing idea.

Berlin didn’t originate the hedgehog and the fox concept. The ancient Greek poet Archilochus did thousands of years ago, but Berlin gave it currency in the 20th-century, and it caught on. So, Dante and Hegel are often grouped with the hedgehogs; Shakespeare and James Joyce with the foxes. If nothing else the hedgehog and the fox categories provide fodder for cocktail parties. An entrepreneurial fellow might create a Hedgehog and Fox Blog; everyone with email could join one group or another, or put their friends in a category.

Hal Niedzviecki would probably be found among the hedgehogs. In true hedgehog fashion, he finds a single idea and holds on to it tenaciously. He sees everything and everyone through the lens of that one idea. In his new book, The Peep Diaries the hedgehog idea is right there in the subtitle: “How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors.” Niedzviecki hammers away at his idea for more than two hundred pages, and if somehow you’ve missed it in the subtitle he repeats it in the book itself. “We’re all learning to love watching ourselves and our neighbors,” he says in chapter one.

Much of what Niedzviecki says is obvious. Everyone reading this online, as you’re doing now, already knows most if not all of what he has to say. “More than ever we’re putting everything on line,” Niedzviecki writes. Gee! He adds, “it’s getting harder and harder to keep a secret.” Wow! A bit further on he writes, “In the age of Peep, everyone wants to know everything (and everyone wants everyone else to know everything) about who they are, why they are, and how they are.” What will he think of next? Still further on he observes, “Peep culture is our (admittedly twisted) answer to the problem of the dehumanizing of humanity.”

Aha! “The dehumanizing of humanity.” Now, there’s a big theme that nearly every college sophomore has written about in a term paper for the last 50 years. I know I did, and so did many of my classmates. Sophomores are still writing essays on that subject. Much of what Niedzviecki says is trite, clichéd, and dare I say it, muddleheaded.

Perhaps the main problem I have is with the word “Love” in the subtitle – as in “how we’re learning to love watching ourselves and our neighbors.” Now, I know that advertising and public relations persuade masses of people to love things – like Wendy’s hamburgers – and people – like Brad Pitt – so that we consume them in one way or another. But as a teacher at a public university in California I also know that my students do not love the loss of their privacy. Yes, they email and Blog and take photos of themselves and their friends and post them. That is true. But they also dislike invasions of their privacy, and indeed feel that they have a right to it. They don’t want anyone to follow them in the bathroom and watch them poop or pee.

Some of them are willing to fight to preserve their privacy. I know. I teach a class that focuses on privacy issues. In a recent moot court we held in class the students were all on the side of the citizens whose privacy was violated, and against the media that invaded it. When I told them that our college president had surgery to shrink the size of his stomach, and that he had lost 100 pounds they insisted that wasn’t news, and that they’d never print it in the campus newspaper.

I disagreed. If Derek Jeter’s hands and Alex Rodriguez’s knees are news, the college president’s stomach is news, too. He’s getting paid $150,000 a year, and I want to know if he’s healthy or not and able to do his job.

I have always liked gossip, and I like to gossip. I have gossiped about Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Jessica Mitford, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the son and daughter of my friends, Naomi and Stephen Gyllenhaal, who produced Homegrown, the marijuana movie I wrote, and who made everyone who worked on the movie sign a contract saying that they would not do drugs during production. Sometimes there is more news in so-called gossip then in hard news stories. Whenever I hear juicy gossip I email friends. I tell the world. I have largely lived a transparent life ever since I wrote my autobiography Out of the Whale in 1974. I recommend transparency – though Niedzviecki mostly doesn’t. Come out and play, I say.

Privacy is also a very strange thing. In many ways it’s hard to lose it, no matter how hard you try because the context is all-important. When I tell students in a crowded lecture hall that I dropped acid and rioted in the streets in the 1970s it doesn’t mean much if anything to them, and I don’t feel that I have lost my privacy, whatever that is. The students weren’t there, then. They don’t know that historical moment and what it meant. They don’t get it. So, I’m as private as I ever was.

Near the end of The Peep Diaries, Niedzviecki writes that when he began his book he wasn’t sure if he’d end it on a note of “pro or anti-Peep.” When he did reach the end, he says, he was “as undecided as ever” and that he still didn’t know where he stands. “Do I install every possible privacy protection on my computer? Do I track my friends and let them track me?” He does say that he has come to one strong, definite conclusion: he won’t put a picture of his daughter on his blog. And he won’t mention her name online, either.

“That’s about the only thing I’m absolutely sure about when it comes to Peep,” he writes. On his website he writes, “Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a 37 year-old writer/thinker. I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and two-and-a-half year-old.” In a way he has already exposed his daughter. We know she exists; we know her age, we know who her father is. Writing about oneself, one automatically and inevitably writes about others. It is impossible, or nearly so, not to out friends and family if we are writers. It comes with the territory.

Niedzviecki’s book begins to become interesting at the very end when he gets beyond glib phrases like the “dehumanizing of humanity,” and writes about himself, his wife and his daughter. This book could use more candor and more disclosure; make it more like a diary, Hal, and less like a dissertation. The book could also benefit from an insightful comment made by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald had a better idea, I think, than Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs and foxes. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Perhaps if Niedzviecki had started The Peep Diaries by disclosing his duality about “the culture of peep” it would have made for more compelling reading. It would certainly have made the book far more of a human document. After all, the essential humanity of the author is what matters most of all.

[Find Hal Niedzviecki’s The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors at City Lights.]

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Interview with Tim DeChristopher, Utah Oil Lease Spoiler

Posted on April 11, 2009 by RagBlog

In its final days, the Bush administration tried to sell drilling rights to Utah’s Red Rock Country. Student Tim DeChristopher purchased a chunk of that land in an act of civil disobedience.

Modern-Day Monkeywrencher
By Martin Stainthorp / April 10, 2009

During the final days of the Bush administration, Tim DeChristopher’s civil disobedience drew attention to a rushed federal auction for Utah drilling rights.

On Dec. 19, Tim DeChristopher, 27, walked into a Bureau of Land Management building in Salt Lake City where an auction was being held. The federal government was selling drilling rights on 164,000 acres of land in Utah’s Red Rock Country. Earlier that month, several environmental groups—including the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), the Wilderness Society and Earth Justice—had filed a lawsuit challenging the auction. They objected to the leasing of 110,000 acres of public lands, most of which are adjacent to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and argued that drilling would damage views and increase pollution.

When DeChristopher entered the building, officials mistook him for a bidder and allowed him to enter the auction, where he was given a bidding paddle—number 70. The University of Utah economics student says he stood out in a room filled mostly with veteran oil and gas men, but he started holding up his paddle to bid. By the time officials caught on and stopped the auction, DeChristopher had acquired the rights to 12 parcels of land, totaling 22,000 acres—for $1.79 million that he didn’t have.

He later told authorities he had engaged in civil disobedience to protect the land and was willing to go to prison for his actions. Attracting media attention and support from around the world, DeChristopher raised enough money to offer an initial $45,000 payment for the lands he had acquired, but the Bureau of Land Management refused it.

On Jan. 17, the environmental groups won their lawsuit, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar later invalidated 77 controversial leases from the auction, including all of DeChristopher’s. Despite the victory, he still faces federal criminal charges.

‘I see this as the way the environmental movement should be working: with some big groups on the inside… And then people like me, on the outside, pushing the boundaries’

In These Times called DeChristopher in Salt Lake City, where he lives.

Why did you intervene in the auction?

It was a rushed attempt to sell off some of the most precious lands in southern and eastern Utah right before Bush left office. And there were a lot of examples of how rushed it was. One of the most entertaining is that when they first announced what parcels were up for auction, they included land in the city of Moab that had houses on it. They included the land underneath the Moab golf course, which they tried to auction off to drill.

There was a lot of opposition to it, and the environmental impact statement wasn’t adequately done and didn’t factor in a lot of the costs associated with drilling. And the public comment period was rushed and people were obstructed from getting accurate information.

Who were some of the other bidders?

A lot of them were small energy producers who were intending to later flip the parcels, to sell them to the bigger companies. There were a few bigger companies there, like Bill Barrett Corporation. And I was told that one of the companies I was bidding against was Halliburton.

What is your reaction to Secretary Salazar’s decision to invalidate 77 of the leases, including all of yours?

I was encouraged by Salazar’s decision. I saw it as a strong stand by our new administration to protect the land and to protect the climate. The administration not only reinforced the lawsuit, but it also went well beyond the grounds of the lawsuit to challenge those underlying resource management plans.

I see this as the way the environmental movement should be working: with some of the big groups on the inside, like SUWA and NRDC, that are working through their means—whether through lawsuits or whatever is available to them. And then people like me, on the outside, pushing the boundaries and doing the controversial stuff that the big groups can’t do.

Could the lawsuit alone have produced this outcome or was your action necessary?

My action was certainly needed and that’s the feedback I’ve gotten from a lot of people involved in this issue. It brought to light the injustice behind this auction. And it kept it in the media and the public eye for that month or so after the auction before Salazar made his decision.

What’s going to happen to the 77 parcels now?

Now the government goes back and considers whether it’s really a good idea to be auctioning off this land for oil and gas development. It’ll look at the land’s real value and hopefully do an accurate environmental impact statement that weighs the costs of air pollution, the cost of road building, the loss of recreation—all those things it hadn’t considered before.

Do you still expect to be criminally charged?

I would expect that it would still happen. The Salazar decision didn’t erase the case against me even though it did protect the land for now. The one thing that it did is take away the damages from my case, which I think puts me in a better legal position because there’s no way that they can show $1.7 million of damages to anyone. And because the decision is an official ruling stating that this auction was inappropriate and illegal, it strongly supports the idea that what I was standing up against was something unjust.

Have you been surprised by all the support you’ve received?

I’ve been very surprised by that and surprised by how broad that support is. It’s been coming from all over the country and from across the political spectrum. A lot of mainstream folks are supporting this not-so-mainstream action.

From my lawyer, Patrick Shea—the former director of the Bureau of Land Management [under Clinton], who’s now joining my side and supporting what I did—to a lot of professors and folks at the university who are supporting what I did. Last week I went to Utah Valley University, to Orem and Provo, and had two speaking engagements down there. And that’s really the most conservative part of Utah, which is one of the most conservative states in the country. I received a huge amount of support there.

How do you feel about people equating your action with that of Edward Abbey and The Monkey Wrench Gang?

I was a big fan of Edward Abbey, especially when I was younger. And in the last couple months, I’ve met a lot of Edward Abbey’s close friends and some of the people who inspired the characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang. What they told me is that my actions are categorically different than monkeywrenching. The monkeywrenching of Abbey’s style was something solitary that one did at night and then snuck away and never talked about again. Whereas what I did was more in line with civil disobedience, of people openly standing in the way of an unjust law or an unjust system and accepting the consequences for it.

In the weeks following the auction, you raised about $100,000, much of which was intended to pay for the lands. Since that option is now off the table, what do you plan to do with the money?

About $40,000 of that money is in the legal fund that we’ll hang on to because it looks like there’s a good chance that this case will go to trial. And we’ll probably need quite a bit more than that.

The rest of the money is in the lease purchase fund. I’m drafting a letter right now that I’m going to send out in the next few days to all the donors, informing them of what the situation is and asking them whether they want the money returned, put toward my legal fund or put toward another similar cause, namely the nonprofit group that I’ve helped launch in the last two months called Peaceful Uprising—a group that seeks to be the direct action side of the environmental movement that has been lacking in recent years.

Our mission is to train and support and defend those who take nonviolent direct action to protect our future from climate change.

In promoting more aggressive, grassroots tactics within the environmental movement, you’ve expressed criticism of some of the mainstream environmental groups for not pushing people to act outside of traditional methods, such as donating money, writing letters and signing petitions.

All of that stuff is necessary and it needs to continue to be an important part of the movement, but it can’t constitute the whole movement, especially an environmental movement where there are entrenched interests on the other side.

The fossil fuels industry, for example, is profiting off the destruction of our future. We’re battling against this huge force that has far more political power than the movement does. That industry gets to write the rules.

If the environmental movement always plays by the rules, there’s no way we can win. There’s no way we can defend our future. And we’re always going to be backpedaling, which is what we’ve seen in the movement for the last 20 years. We’ve basically tried to just put out fires and gone from one fire to another and we’re always losing ground.

So, if the environmental movement is going to make progress, it must shift the center and shift what’s considered reasonable. There needs to be that direct action side of it.

[Martin Stainthorp is an editorial intern at In These Times. A native of Chicago, he graduated from the University of Richmond in 2007.]

Source / In These Times

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Medicine and Torture: Bad Bedfellows

Posted on April 11, 2009 by RagBlog

Handcuffs sit at the foot of a chair used for interrogation inside a cell in the maximum security Camp 5 at Camp Delta on May 9, 2006 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

U.S. Medical Personnel and Interrogations: What Do We Know? What Don’t We Know?
By Sheri Fink / April 9, 2009

This week’s posting of a confidential International Committee of the Red Cross report (PDF) about the treatment of 14 “high value detainees” held in secret CIA prisons has again raised a nettlesome question: In exactly what ways were medical personnel involved in abusive detainee interrogations?

The report, put online by The New York Review of Books in connection with articles written by Mark Danner, was based on interviews with the detainees who had been kept isolated from each other. ICRC media delegate Bernard Barrett confirmed in an e-mail that the report was authentic. “We have publicly deplored that this confidential material was made public as that was never our intent.” (The ICRC provides this explanation of its role.)

The detainees reported that health personnel generally provided them with high-quality medical care, but also said that some health workers oversaw or participated in “ill-treatment” such as beatings and waterboarding.

One detainee alleged that a health worker told him, “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”

Responding to questions from the New York Times, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said his agency had long ago ended the interrogation program and the agency, as directed by the Obama administration, will only use techniques that fall within the Army Field Manual (PDF).

To put the new information into perspective, ProPublica offers these answers to key questions about the roles of American medical personnel in detainee treatment in recent years.

What is known about the involvement of health professionals in the interrogations?

For years, reporters have been detailing the roles of psychologists and psychiatrists in the now-abandoned interrogation practices.

“Psychologists, working in secrecy…actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.,” Katherine Eban wrote for Vanity Fair in 2007.

Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen reportedly “reverse-engineered” tactics from a military training program known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), originally designed to help captured U.S. soldiers withstand abusive treatment. They then showed military and CIA interrogators how to apply the tactics to detainees in an effort to break them down, according to articles and Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side.”

The two have not discussed their role with journalists, but they did release a statement in response to the Vanity Fair article stressing their opposition to torture. They said they were proud of their work for the country and that their actions and advice were legal and ethical. “Under no circumstances have we ever endorsed, nor would we endorse, the use of interrogation methods designed to do physical or psychological harm.” We also called Mitchell Jessen and Associates consulting firm for comment and were told, “It is their policy not to give interviews.”

Psychologists and psychiatrists, sometimes working as Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (known as “BSCTs”), reportedly helped craft interrogation plans for specific detainees, a role they may still be playing in spite of opposition from professional medical associations, according to an Army medical policy document issued in 2006 and recently made public by the New England Journal of Medicine. The Army stressed that BSCT medical personnel were applying their knowledge to information-gathering and were not involved in providing medical care to the detainees, helping avoid a conflict in loyalties.

Criticisms have also been leveled at the access military and CIA interrogators had to detainees’ medical records and their ability to direct health personnel to provide them with information (PDF). After reviewing Defense Department interrogation operations in 2004, the military acknowledged (PDF) that in Iraq and Afghanistan, “interrogators sometimes had easy access to such information” but found that they did not use it inappropriately.

What other issues have been raised?

Early reports focused on abusive treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, chief of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, who was interviewed as part of the Taguba investigation, testified that a psychiatrist and another doctor monitored interrogations (PDF) at the prison and had the final say in what aspects of the interrogation plan were implemented.

Military doctors and nurses were criticized for failing to report evidence of abuse. In a few instances, detainees who were initially certified by physicians as having died of natural causes were later acknowledged by the Pentagon to have died of homicides due to asphyxia or blunt force injuries.

The health system for detainees at Abu Ghraib was found to be poorly equipped and understaffed. Geneva Conventions requirements to provide monthly health inspections and allow prisoners to request proper medical care were not fulfilled there and in Afghanistan, according to internal military investigations described in the Lancet in 2004 and in the book “Oath Betrayed” by ethicist Steven Miles.

After the scandal broke, the Department of Defense reviewed its procedures for medical personnel dealing with detainees and, in 2005, issued more specific guidelines that called for personnel to be guided by medical ethics and report inhumane treatment.

The Office of the Army Surgeon General also conducted an extensive assessment of detainee medical operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo beginning in late 2004. While it concluded that medical personnel had made extraordinary efforts to provide “compassionate and dedicated care” to prisoners and detainees, it also found problems with the security of medical records and the extent to which medical personnel were trained about the need to report suspected detainee abuse.

The report recommended that all medical personnel be prohibited “from active participation in interrogations” and that psychiatrists and other physicians no longer be part of BSCTs. Former Army Surgeon General Kevin Kiley did not approve the latter recommendation.

What do standards of medical ethics have to say about health professionals participating in detainee questioning?

When it comes to torture and other mistreatment (as opposed to lawful interrogations), widely accepted standards of medical ethics are clear: Physicians and other health personnel cannot participate, facilitate or be present. Physicians and other health professionals are also forbidden from using their specialized knowledge and skills to facilitate ill treatment.

When captives are brought to detention sites, they must be given medical checks and ongoing care, and doctors must report any suspected abuses up the chain of command. The role of health professionals “is explicitly to protect [detainees] from … ill-treatment,” according to the ICRC report. If a detainee has a medical emergency during questioning, a physician can be called in to provide treatment.

Recently, medical societies have laid out strict policies that restrict their members’ participation in even lawful interrogations. The American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics was updated in 2006 to ban physicians from conducting interrogations or monitoring them “with the intention of intervening in the process.” The reason for this is described in the ICRC report: “Any interrogation process that…requires a health professional to monitor the actual procedure, must have inherent health risks” and is thus “contrary to international law.”

The American Psychiatric Association issued an even broader ban on involvement in interrogations, forbidding psychiatrists from being in a room where an interrogation is ongoing.

The American Psychological Association took a different stance in 2005, opposing torture but expressly acknowledging a role for its psychologist members in gathering information that “can be used in our nation’s and other nations’ defense,” including serving as interrogation consultants. The task force that made that recommendation was later criticized as being biased. Last year, the association approved new guidelines that would restrict psychologists from participating in interrogations at sites that violate international law or the U.S. Constitution.

What questions remain?

The list of unknowns is long. How, why and when the CIA brought SERE-affiliated psychologists and psychiatrists into the interrogation strategy of detainees remains a mystery.

The question of how effective the practices they allegedly developed were at eliciting useful intelligence also remains a matter of debate, with recent media reports casting doubt on the usefulness of intelligence obtained from one of the captives, Abu Zubaida. Last month on CNN former Vice President Dick Cheney defended his administration’s programs dealing with suspected terrorists as “essential to the success” in preventing attacks on U.S. soil after 9/11.

The exact roles medical personnel are playing in presumably lawful interrogations being conducted today are also unclear.

Also unknown are the identities of most of the medical personnel involved in abusive interrogations. Their numbers may be small. The Office of the Army Surgeon General queried more than 1000 medical personnel from more than 180 military units (nearly 900 had served or were serving in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo) and found only five instances of medical personnel participating in interrogations.

Are there any investigations coming?

Sen. Patrick Leahy recently proposed a nonpartisan commission of inquiry to “get to the truth of what went on during the last several years.” In a statement last week, Leahy said that the ICRC report and other recent revelations demonstrate “why we cannot just turn the page without reading it.”

The advocacy organization Physicians for Human Rights is calling for the proposed commission to “document the use of the healing professions to design, supervise, and implement a regime of abuse.” The group wants health professionals who participated to be referred to state licensing boards, which could consider stripping them of the right to practice.

An aide to Leahy told ProPublica that an exploration of medical professionals’ roles “remains to be determined…There’s no bill or detailed proposal.” The senator’s statement expressed his concern not to “scapegoat or punish those of lesser rank.”

Source / Pro Publica

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